1 week ago

1 week ago

1 week ago

1 week ago

Morning Five: 06.21.10 Edition

We’re getting closer to the NCAA making a decision on how to handle the four PiGs, and Gene Smith, chairman of the NCAA D1 Basketball Committee, is already giving it a good deal of thought. His preference is to have the lowest RPI conference champions make up the four PiGs, but he sounds open to the at-large idea as well (let’s hope so!). He isn’t sure how the rest of the committee feels at this point. One interesting piece of news from the article is that highly successful play-in game holder Dayton may be on the chopping block as the site for the four games. Indianapolis — home of the NCAA –has a substantial amount of support for the move, according to Smith. Interesting.

The Big 12 is dusting itself off and getting back to the business of running a power conference with its remaining ten member institutions. Should the Big 12 decide to expand back to, you know, twelve teams again, Mike DeCourcy recommends adding Memphis and UNLV to its mix. From a basketball perspective, this would undoubtedly make an already nasty conference even stronger.

Utah’s Jim Boylen is doing cartwheels about the recruiting advantages that he can use now as a member of the realigned Pac-10. There’s no question that joining the west coast league will help the Ute program in recruiting, but we’re still unsure about how successful the program will be simply by moving “up” in conference pedigree. It’ll be interesting to watch this.

Luke Winn’s report on incoming stud recruit Harrison Barnes at UNC: he “could be the smoothest scoring forward to hit college hoops since [Kevin] Durant.” High, high praise.

The Knight Commission’sreport last week revealing the stratospheric rise of spending on sports per athlete (now $85k per athlete annually vs. $13k per normal student) shows quite clearly just how far down the path of big-money sports we’ve already gone. There really is no turning back now, and recommendations such as the Commission’s to tie NCAA postseason eligibility to graduation rates (suggested: 50%) will only further cement the huge disconnect between these moneymaking programs and the academic mission of their institutions. The only viable endgame to this situation is a complete separation of these huge dollar programs from the NCAA — it seems that there can be no other answer. The question is when?